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An anonymous reader writes "KDE 4.5.0 has been released to the world. See the release announcement for details. Highlights include a Webkit browser rendering option for Konqueror, a new caching mechanism for a faster experience and a re-worked notification system. Another new feature is Perl bindings, in addition to Python, Ruby and JavaScript support. The Phonon multimedia library now integrates with PulseAudio. See this interview with KDE developer and spokesperson Sebastian Kugler on how KDE can continue to be innovative in the KDE4 age. Packages should be available for most Linux distributions in the coming days. More than 16000 bug fixes were committed since 4.4."

Seriously though, phonon has pluggable backends, and this does not mean the PulseAudio is going to be compulsory for KDE users, any more than its DirectShow integration makes MS Windows compulsory for KDE users.

Seriously though, phonon has pluggable backends, and this does not mean the PulseAudio is going to be compulsory for KDE users, any more than its DirectShow integration makes MS Windows compulsory for KDE users.

I really appreciate this feature. Instead of just hearing sound from speakers, I find it tremendously important to be able to "plug my own backend" to hear it, you know, somehow differently.

I'd rather have just the working backend; not as a default, but as the only option.

How is the distributor supposed to know, in advance, which backend is the best working backend for your particular hardware? The options are there in case automatic detection fails, so that you can at least have sound for the six months between when you install a distribution and when the distributor releases the next version that may or may not correct the defect in automatic detection of your particular hardware.

This is a rather flawed argument: it's in the "Computer Administration" section, which is obviously not for playing with randomly as one might with "Look & Feel". If you go there without knowing what you're doing and break things, you were going to break your computer anyway.

In general, I would rather that developers keep obscure options available, (with sane defaults, and under an "Advanced" tab or similar) than remove them in case idiots play with them. If you don't agree with me, you're welcome to u

Compile-time? Why? Phonon is designed so that *all* backends that work with your OS can be provided and users can change backends in run-time without any applications having to handle anything, or even needing to be aware that anything has changed. Why should it be "unreasonable" for a user to select backends?

I gave the example of MS Windows especially so that people would realise that different types of computer require audio to be output using different systems. I can't tell whether you're implying that KDE developers getting to use a unified audio API across different operating systems complicates the user experience in some way, or that you are somebody who pointedly doesn't care how things work internally, in which case I'm not sure why you bothered replying.

I can't tell whether you're implying that KDE developers getting to use a unified audio API across different operating systems complicates the user experience in some way, or that you are somebody who pointedly doesn't care how things work internally, in which case I'm not sure why you bothered replying.

Phonon in KDE *is* a user-visible entity. You have to priorize different backends, etc. You can also enjoy nice error messages about Phonon backends not working when running KDE programs inside Gnome.

Frankly, not supporting PA well has been the most ridiculous shortcoming in KDE (after networkmanager).

I am puzzled at what this networkmanager problem you state is/was? been using kde since 2002 and networkmanager has been around at least five years plus on my fedora system.

In regards to kde and PA, ever since PA graced it's ugly head some years ago (fedora users are always first for every new system, yay for bugs) it's been no more buggy than under other window managers.

I think he's speaking about the fact that networkmanager integration in early KDE 4.x releases was EXTREMELY deficient.

If I recall correctly, Ubuntu had to pretty much write their own NM interface for KDE 4.x, and on my one remaining Gentoo box, I had to run the KDE 3.5 networkmanager applet for quite a while to have any sort of networkmanager functionality.

Back in KDE 3.x days, NetworkManager was just getting started, and Unbuntu shipped a very bad snapshot of it which prevented network connections.

At the time Unbuntu shipped this broken copy, the KDE NetworkManager group had already shifted dev work to the 4.x series, but Unbuntu didn't ship a 4.x KDE until much later. As a result, Unbuntu's poor QA and packing practices led most people to think that NetworkManager didn't work under KDE, rather than the correct conclusion, which is that Unbuntu didn't do pr

It does amaze me, as someone who tried the 'modern' Linux desktop several times over the past 15 years and always came away shaking my head, that audio support within Linux is still a topic that prompts regular discussion - when I am on Windows or OSX, I don't even know what the audio subsystem is called because its never been an issue, Ive never had to tinker with it. Hell, for the past 5 years I haven't even needed to install drivers and its still produced beautiful sound.

I can't comment on the rest of the Linux UI experience (my Linux knowledge is firmly positioned in the headless server region), but come on - audio is something that shouldn't even be on a users agenda for worrying about these days.

I don't even know what the audio subsystem is called because its never been an issue, Ive never had to tinker with it. Hell, for the past 5 years I haven't even needed to install drivers and its still produced beautiful sound.

Linux sound works perfectly for me now that Pulseaudio is stabilized. And it is great, I no longer use the system volume like I did in the past, I have a pulseaudio plasmoid which shows a volume bar for every app streaming audio and I tweak the bars as I like. I still see many people who like to bash Pulseaudio, but most of them seem to talk about the Pulseaudio of one or two years ago. In the latest releases of Ubuntu and Fedora I did google for any review that would talk about pulseaudio or any kind of sound problems. It turns out I found several reviews talking about how the new release had fixed the audio problems they had in previous releases, and only one talking about new audio problems. So it seems to me that Linux audio has got fixed and greatly improved with PA, but I don't think the PA haters will admit it.

It has certainly gotten better, but there are still plenty of issues with audio in Linux, at least out of the box. Some of them are driver related, some are still PA related, and some are related to poor default Alsa configurations. I can give several current (Ubuntu 10.04) examples of audio issues in Linux.

Some HDMI sinks tend to run at 48khz regardless of the source frequency (another poster here mentioned the 48khz madness). Moreover, Alsa doesn't seem to re-sample the audio properly by default in these cases, creating the chipmunk phenomenon. I'm fairly sure this is an Alsa-script fixable issue.

In certain situations, applications seem to lock the sound device causing all kinds of consternation. This shouldn't happen (software mixing ought to always kick in). This is most likely because those applications don't use Pulseaudio (which isn't yet appropriate for all tasks, and probably never will be). As with above, I'm sure this can be fixed with Alsa magic, but it shouldn't have to be

M-Audio 2496 internal audio card doesn't play well with Pulseaudio (to be fair, I last tried this with 9.10, never with 10.04). Apparently, it didn't have the kinds of Alsa controls that PA expected.

When plugging external speakers into my laptop (a TimelineX), the sound on the internal speakers would turn off, the but the external speakers would not get the sound. Eventually fixed by upgrading to 10.10 alpha.

As another poster mentioned, getting s/pdif to work properly is often non-trivial. Alsa is pretty good about offering raw access to the sound card controls, but it isn't always obvious what combination of control settings are compatible with digital audio out. In some cases, it is a single switch, but in other less fortunate cases, 3 or 4 controls need to be set properly before it will work. To make matters worse, there isn't a lot of documentation about what settings will work properly with a given audio interface. Usually, it's 15-20 minutes of forum reading before I can find some obscure reference to the information I need.

I don't know if it is Phonon or Amarok-specific, but I can tell you that for whatever reason, AmaroK completely screws up my system sound every time I use it.

Music played within Amarok will play fine, but everything else becomes silent until I fire up MythTV and watch something, as Myth seems to do a pretty thorough reset of my system's audio output settings once it finishes playback, while AmaroK seems to leave them hanging in a wacky state.

I have never needed to tinker with my audio for the last 8 years with Linux.

I've had a Pentium 2, an AMD 2800 and currently a Phenome 9950 X4. My Eee PC 900 (Celeron version) was also just working. An Pentium Dual Core Dell office pc and a Dell Precision with a Core 2 Duo...

Audio problems? Linux? I know some Alsa drivers are truly crappy. So crappy and buggy that PulseAudio doesn't work. But PulseAudio never failed me, except once with that Dell Precision for the first two Ubuntu releases that shipped Pulse

I think you will find that pulseaudio is able to quite a lot more than just play sounds. E.g, you can have one program play in your speakers and another in your usb headphones. The mainstay of the discussion is whether anyone needs this, and whether pulseaudio is bugfree enough for everyday use. The bit you mention has been solved by ALSA for a long time now.

I never managed to make the audio system in Windows XP behave as i would like. I have 2 sound output devices(Headphones and an usb headset) and I never managed tocontrol which software did output to which sound device. And I also miss a Windows application to control the sound level on an "per application" level. And features such as redirect audio to other computers.

So part of the reason the linux audio system is still in a bit of a flux is that it is designed to do so much more then windows, thus making i

Personally, I love the new OSS. What I don't love, is the pain in the ass procedure to get it installed. I'm no guru, but I'm no dummy either. It took me about 3 hours to get OSS4 installed. Yeah, it was GREAT - but it was just to much sweat. Every once in a while, I do another search for a distro that ships with OSS4 instead of PA/ALSA. No luck so far.

i like the new notification system, but it still feels hacked together.if you close tabs or subwindows in your notification it resizes in a jerky way.doesnt feel really smooth and looks unprofessional.it would be nice if you could make the notifications "transparent" in front ofcertain windows (the way its done with the ubuntu notifications).it annoys me to no end having notifications pop up, while you are gaming.but i hope they will fix that in later releases.

Just because it complies with some formal coding styles and formatting doesn't say anything about the actual content and sanity of the structure. Very many systems seem to get do-overs on a regular basis.

review board isn't about code styles and formatting. Its about seeing what the changes were to the code. Sure, you can use reviewboard for style-based code reviews, but its trivial to also use it for potential code issues. Its really there for an experienced developer to cast his eyes over the changes, and to make sure it doesn't do anything he knows is wrong.

If you're using reviewboard solely for style reviews, its because your development processes havn't yet been printed out, rolled up and shoved into your development manager.

I think I'm the typical techy user. During the day I'll use xterm , open office, firefox and gxine. And maybe one or 2 other apps.Can someone explain to me why I need a huge resource hungry window manager, sorry - desktop enviroment - like KDE running as my machine? This is a genuine question, not an anti KDE troll. I simply don't get it.

Because for every one of you, there are 10 (or more) folks that are not techy's and appreciate the richer UI.

You can probably get by w/ e16/fvwm/fluxbox, and be extremely productive. Users who have used Win32 will appreciate a similar UI to help them ease into the power of a linux desktop.

KDE is more than just a desktop Environment, it's a whole programming library and philosophy that unifies a family of applications, so they can interoperate, exchange data, and work together as well as you do.

That philosophy is flawed. It prioritizes eye candy instead of guarantying desktop usability

While that may be debatable, I'm alluding to (IMHO) brilliant technical achievements of kio-slaves, kparts, dcop (which worked really well before dbus was widely adopted), and so on. The component architecture of KDE, when fully embraced, is a great modern interpretation of the old unix philosophy "Each tool should one thing, and do it well"

In your case, it sounds like a solution in search of a problem. You seem quite able to do your own thing and having to do similar things in KDE's framework might prove to be a stumbling block for your workflow.

That said, for a lot of people who might not be so technical inclined, the KDE desktop *becomes* linux. Sure, in reality, it's just a desktop manager, but for those who choose to avoid digging deeper, KDE for all purposes becomes a metaphor for linux itself. For other people like me (mind you, I'm

Depends on your needs. If you are running on a notebook, for example, common things that you might need are:

plug&play usb drives

battery indication and automatic change of performance profile

easy network management

plug&play different with types of screens

you'd like to have a notified notification system, with support for reviewing the recent history (for those times when you ask yourself "what was that thing that just appeared and disappeared before I could read?")

I use KDE for the same reason I use eclipse instead of emacs: It is functional, integrated and easy to apply my work flows to it. KDE is comfortable and comfort if very important when you are using the desktop hours on end every day of the week.

I hate to use MacOSX or Windows because I lack empathy to the way Mr Jobs and the whole MS & Partners think I should interact with my desktop. I annoys me and instead of getting things done, I get the feeling of fighting the computer. I also dislike plain window

The reason I use Kubuntu on every desktop I can, rather than other more interesting distros (or FreeBSD), is mainly because I see it as the only distro that has any chance of gaining general acceptance in my place of work as a windows replacement. Hence, I put up with some of the choices of Canonical which annoy me, for the sake of hoping to have a better and saner over-all environment in our office someday... KDE tends to impress visually everyone who sees it.

I think I'm the typical techy user. During the day I'll use xterm , open office, firefox and gxine. And maybe one or 2 other apps.Can someone explain to me why I need a huge resource hungry window manager, sorry - desktop enviroment - like KDE running as my machine? This is a genuine question, not an anti KDE troll. I simply don't get it.

If you start integrating things like GUI file manager, GUI system configuration/control panel, and a desktop widget system (application launch menu, volume control, network/WLAN status&control, printer status&control, application notifications...), you quickly end up with something very much like Gnome or KDE.

KDE and Gnome are also a set of application libraries. It saves memory and simplifies updates when all the applications use the same libraries, not to mention unified look&feel of applicat

First of all, if you really aren't trolling, you should know the difference between a window manager and a DE. It's about as irritating as saying "Ubuntu is a terrible window manager, sorry - distribution".

As to why you need a DE? You don't. Some people like using them, others don't. A few examples of things I use KDE for:

most importantly, a well-integrated suite of applications with a consistent look at feel (and not just in terms of appearance: for example, the dialogue for configuring keyboard shortcuts is always in the same place in the menu structure in a KDE application). This includes an office suite, web browser, basic utilities and so on. Example of integration: dragging a link from a web page to a directory (both open in konqueror) saves the file there rather than creating a shortcut or something.

if you don't care about disk space and do a full KDE SC install, you have a matching set of utilities such as a calculator, basic text editor, magnifier, volume control, clipboard manager (very useful), etc.

you get some integration between the WM and the rest of the system: applications will not have keyboard shortcuts that conflict with your WM, for example.

various user daemons: reminders of calendar events, graphical display of messages sent with wall(1), etc.

an easy way to mount and unmount removable media

KDE also has some very nice features for application developers, such as the kparts system, which further improves consistency. For example, kate (an advanced text editor), kwrite (a notepad-style editor), Kile (a LaTeX IDE) and kdevelop (a software development IDE) all use katepart for text editing, which gives their text editing widgets the same appearance, keyboard shortcuts, indenting options and so on.

I've only scratched the surface here, but it's still perfectly reasonable to use a simple WM with some kind of launcher instead, or to switch between them.

I really like KDE and I believe that it needs to be supported better by distributions. Kubuntu is a mess.

The investments of KDE in code quality [englishbre...etwork.org] and design will pay off. Unfortunately runtime quality was lacking, esp. reg. Plasma crashes in earlier versions. KDE is now in a state where it maturates. Here the SC split in three components really makes a whole lot of sense.

I agree Kubuntu is a mess, I installed it recently to try KDE 4.4 and was completely turned off it. Mandriva seem to get KDE right. But I'm still not coming back, not just yet.I really liked KDE 3.5. KDE 4 turned me off Linux desktops completely - I'm now a Mac user. It'll be years before KDE regains the users lost due to early KDE 4 versions.

Yep, that's right! I am still not buying Fords since their disaster model Pinto [wikipedia.org] in the early 1970s. And it'll take them many more decades to regain my trust!
I am not stubborn or anything, but if KDE made a mistake once, they can never be trusted again! Ever! Especially in the software business, where hardly anybody takes any wrong decisions these days.

I am still getting massive RAM usage from plasma-desktop after moving from RC2. I understood it being higher in RC2 but 174mb in Plasma, in the stable version, is extremely odd. Anyone else getting it this high? Not using many plasmoids here, just a pretty standard set of clock and taskbar and such.Anyway this release is strangely disappointing. I am not even sure of what I was expecting with it but feels the same with a new notification system (still bothersome when doing anything fullscreen, too). Oh well

How do you measure RAM usage? not with top, I hope... Because most of the plasma memory is in fact the pixmaps which are counted thrice (once for the app, once for the xserver, and an extra time in the videocard for the double-buffering)

See, plasma runs on phones [slideshare.net], so clearly it is not that heavy (not that phones are not pretty powerful these days, but still)...

but it would be even better if the robustness were more of a priority.

KDE is doing a Miguel de Icaza lately and imitating Microsoft's "total integration," including their own version of the Registry: akonadi. Which may be nice, but it's also terribly fragile for something that's supposed to hold all of your data. See, for instance, bug 244250 [kde.org].

I use the Marble globe with satellite images as a background for my KDE desktop. After upgrading to 4.5 yesterday, I noticed clouds were added to it. "How pretty", I though. It turns out that clouds are not placed randomly for scenic effect, they are actually downloaded images of the current state of clouds all over the planet. Yes I checked yesterday, and today the image is slightly different and still consistent with satellite imagery from weather websites.

Maybe you're even more impressed if I tell you that the stars in the background aren't random stars. They show the positions of the real stars. So if you look above the earth's north pole you can spot the big dipper and polaris.

Integration is not simply about having an extra widget (which has been there for some time). Integration is about saving sessions, integrating with kwallet.

It is also about providing the API which is used by other applications for purposes other than displaying web pages. All these things, KHTML does, and does well (as well as displaying the web pages), but the webkit kpart needed much development.

Webkit has had Apple developing for it in the 8 or 9 years since they created it. It also has a much larger userbase than KHTML since it is used as the basis for Safari, Chrome and many mobile browsers (notably those on Symbian and Android, and of course iOS).

Because I have tens of thousands of mails with way too many attachments. And some people have ten or a hundred times as much.

So nothing short of a RDBMS will in fact cope with that volume. And I should also add that whining about is is a purely knee-jerk reaction as in most cases it will use very little resources (way less than your browser). I guess you are an old hand who remembers days when servers would be dedicated to running these beasts. Well, that still happens, but only for very, very large dataset

I disagree about the 'waah, it uses too many resources' as there's plenty of times code is written as cheaply as possible (for the developer, that is) leaving the users to pick up the tab. The cost-basis of coding *should* be the other way round, but I guess that's just my ideal.

However, in this case it looks like Akonadi has used a DB to store its cache instead of a simpler, internal, construct. Or a sqlite DB, which is very suited for this task. Whether the developer didn't know about serialising a key-va

OK, I didn't check this rigorously (Why should I? This is slashdot!), but it seems to me that every single one of the past five releases of KDE/Kubuntu and Ubuntu featured a significantly improved/totally reworked notification system. Each time I was expecting some breakthrough experience, and it just always looks like a more or less OK notification system. And this is one of the top 5 highlighted features? Was it so broken to begin with? Did it really get so much better? Am I missing something here?
I definitely appreciate very much the developers fixing bugs and making the system more stable and polished. Thanks! However, if some trivial things get sold in an exaggerating way, this may actually not help the image of KDE (GNOME, Linux, etc.). After all, one of the reasons I am using FOSS is because I am really tired of stupid bullshit advertising crap.

the notification system is hard: applications like to embed little applets in the tray, for one thing, and interaction with these in a clean, consistent way is not easy. Notifications are also hard to get right: you want all the information, you want it non-obtrusive, you want to know what is happening, you want to be able to respond to them in a timely manner.

Basically, it is a very small part of your desktop which can cause immense amounts of grief: a lot of the bad rap vista got was from the popups from there...

Ubuntu gives a lot of love and care to its Gnome configuration, as well as adding their own addons. Kubuntu ships something closer to vanilla KDE, and there have been a few releases which have been a bit broken in the past. That said, I'm using Kubuntu currently, and I rather like it.

So, to GP: Why don't you just "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" on your current Ubuntu installation, switch GDM to log you into KDE, and explore a bit? You should be able to remove kubuntu-desktop and the unwanted KDE pack

Even though Kubuntu (I am a user of it) does have some rough edges, I'd stick with it. It is a lot better than it used to be.

The main reason I'd suggest sticking with it though is just familiarity. You can switch back and forth between GNOME and KDE pretty effortlessly running the same distro.

That being said, I hate to discourage exploration! Download live CD's for every distro that sounds interesting! Try them all! (-: Maybe you will like one better... after all, with Linux even switching an entire

For me there never was a war. It's KDE, hands down. The most popular option is never the highest quality.

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.-- Matthew 7:13-14

Never a war for me too. I used both, each has a different what-ya-ma-call-it... fuck, blank... philosophy! Each has their own philosophy towards the user experience. You gel with the one, or the other, and some folks can switch between the two and not care about the differences.

Kinda like being bisexual, a double adapter, open-minded to exploration and pene... [cut explicit rambling here]

It appears there isn't a package for the backend in Ubuntu Lucid currently. But I'm actually using it, using a package I made and store in my KDE-related PPA. I also have a package for the MPlayer backend. Here's the link, if anyone is interested: